Once you have signed up for Google Apps, the next things most folks are looking to accomplish is setup their email account. As with many things, Google has the information posted on their site, but it may take some quick searching. If you are as fortunate as me, you were sent to a page describing just how to set up Google Mail during your Google Apps registration process. If were not so fortunate, here is a link to that page.

As you can see, the process is rather straight forward and consists of the following steps:

  1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
  2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
  3. Tap Add Account….
  4. Select Microsoft Exchange. OS 4.0+ now allows multiple Exchange accounts.
  5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address, i.e. me@mydomain.com. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
  6. Leave the Domain field blank. (Important.)
  7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username, i.e. me@mydomain.com.
  8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
  9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
  10. Choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears. (I never say this dialog.)
  11. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com.
  12. Press Next at the top of your screen again.
  13. Select the Google services (Mail, Calendar, and Contacts) you want to sync. (I selected them all since I wanted to replace MobileMe.)
  14. Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes. (I selected it as you can always choose to only view these items from Google later and ignore your local copy.)
  15. If you want to sync only the My Contacts group, you must choose to Delete Existing Contacts during the Google Sync install when prompted. If you choose to keep existing contacts, it will sync the contents of the “All Contacts” group instead. If there are no contacts on your phone, the latter will happen — the contents of your All Contacts group will be synced.

Of course, I copied this from the above linked Google help page, but these are the essential bits. I followed this to the letter on both my iPhone and iPad with absolutely no problems. The only thing is you will have to be patient and wait for the Contacts to sync up over time. It is not instantaneous but should be done within a short time. Mine took all of ten (10) minutes to complete.

In addition, you will begin to see another list of Contacts on your iPhone/iPad. This will be under the Groups listing and named after the email address you entered, i.e. me@mydomain.com. If you are looking on your Google Mail account, look for the contacts listed under My Contacts. Any other contacts you create on Google will not be matched up, so make sure you only use those when creating/editing them online.

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